Cisco IOS IP SLAs generates and analyses traffic either between Cisco IOS devices or from a Cisco IOS device to a remote IP device such as a network application server. Cisco IP SLAs is Layer 2 transport independent, you can configure end-to-end operations over disparate networks to best reflect the metrics that an end user is likely to experience.

IP SLA collects the data based on the parameters such as Delay (both round-trip and one-way); Jitter; Packet Loss; Packet Sequencing; Path per hop; Connectivity and Website downtime.

IP SLAs to monitor the performance between any area in the network—core, distribution, and edge—without deploying a physical probe. It uses generated traffic to measure network performance between two networking devices. IP SLAs begins when the source device sends a generated packet to the destination device.

After the destination device receives the packet, depending on the type of IP SLAs operation, it responds with time-stamp information for the source to make the calculation on performance metrics. An IP SLAs operation performs a network measurement from the source device to a destination in the network using a specific protocol such as UDP.

Cisco IOS IP SLAs is SNMP-accessible, it can also be used by performance-monitoring applications like CiscoWorks Internetwork Performance Monitor (IPM) and other third-party Cisco partner performance management products.

To implement IP SLAs network performance measurement, you need to perform these tasks:

Enable the IP SLAs responder, if required.

Configure the required IP SLAs operation type.

Configure any options available for the specified operation type.

Configure threshold conditions, if required.

Schedule the operation to run, then let the operation run for a period of time to gather statistics.

Display and interpret the results of the operation using the Cisco IOS CLI or a network management system (NMS) system with SNMP.

Configure an ICMP echo IP SLAs operation

RouteXP(config)# ip sla 12

RouteXP(config-ip-sla)# icmp-echo 172.29.139.134

RouteXP(config-ip-sla-echo)# frequency 30

RouteXP(config-ip-sla-echo)# exit

RouteXP(config)# ip sla schedule 5 start-time now life forever

RouteXP(config)# end

RouteXP# show ip sla configuration 22

IP Address used in the above mentioned example of configuration is just for the demo purpose and has no relevance with any of the live or the enterprise network.